Leadership, Resilience, and Sales Mastery | Rich Makover, Ep 16
Episode Summary
Rich Makover, a fractional Chief Revenue Officer and executive coach at TechCXO, discusses his journey from Penn State lacrosse player to CPA to sales leadership at Avon and beyond. He shares insights on hiring athletes for sales roles, the importance of resilience over winning, situational coaching methodologies, and his transition to fractional leadership and executive coaching, including his decade-long mentoring program for Penn State lacrosse.
Pull Quotes
On why he prefers hiring former athletes for sales roles
“I honestly think it's less about knowing how to win. It's that they know how to lose. They know how to be resilient. There's no athlete that has won 100% of the time.”
“Your skills you get to keep. Your job you may not, but your skills are yours.”
On hiring for channel sales roles
“I would take an athlete or somebody who's been banged around. I'd take a musician too. Musicians, you know, they got to get up on stage. Anyone who's been in that moment of stress and has failed, I'll take those folks. I'd prefer to train them than thinking I'm going to hire someone from an industry just because they have a quote unquote Rolodex.”
“The biggest difference I would say between coaching and advising is that when you're advising, the answer is not already in the room. Nobody there knows how to do this. Coaching is when the answer is in the room. You just have to help them unlock it.”
On why career transitions are psychologically difficult for experienced professionals
“Most of us in our generation didn't have ten jobs like our kids are going to have by the time they get to be thirty. Most of these guys was at the same bank for twenty-five, thirty years. He doesn't even believe he could do something different.”
Transcript
Hi, welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen and we get their stories. So today's guest in the Sky Lounge is Rich McVover. Hi Rich, hey Tod, how you doing? Doing well. Rich, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Who are you?
Well, as if you know accents, you'll know in two seconds I'm a New Yorker, born and bred here in New York. Grew up on Long Island and married my high school sweetheart. So I lived around the world and ended up living ten minutes away from where we grew up. Didn't expect that. But anyway, I'm a son of a coach. I played sports my whole life. I played lacrosse at Penn State. Penn State's a big part of my life. My wife went there, my sister, my brother, they married Penn Staters, my kids. So we got a lot of Penn State in our blood. I did that for four years, had a great time there. It's still a big part of my life. I'm sure it'll come out across during the conversation.
After that, I went into finance. CPA, big KPMG. I didn't think that was for me forever and got transitioned into a love for beauty products. Avon products. You know, the Avon lady. I was around there for a long time, learned a lot about business and leadership there. Had phenomenal bosses, phenomenal mentors in my life that has been incredibly important. Had a chance to see the world, had a chance to live in Hong Kong with my wife and I for a few years. Got into sales, sales management, sales strategy, leadership, et cetera.
And then since then I've always been in the sales and revenue area. Fortunate enough to work in some private equity portfolio companies as chief revenue officers for luxury products, jewelry, watches, but then also in home. And then after a number of years of doing chief sales officer, chief revenue officer, I was very fortunate to get a call from a good friend of mine, Bob, who's a partner at Texas EXO. He said you may want to consider fractional. I didn't even know what it was. I did a little research on it. It took me a while to come to this, but it sounds right. My only regret is I wish I would have started a year or two earlier. So I've been here now for a couple years, coming up with my two-year anniversary in a month. It's been really fantastic. I'm a chief revenue officer for a number of companies and an executive coach. I've got a number of clients not only with the practice but also with my own network. So I get to blend coaching as an executive coach as well as being a head of sales or chief revenue officer. It's been really great. I've really enjoyed it.
That's awesome. That's an awesome career. I don't know where to begin. So many cool things to talk about. Just means I'm old though, Todd. It just means I've been around for a lot. It means you're fun and you like Penn State. Oh yeah. So let's talk about athletics. A lot of people associate sales and athletic performance at a high level. I've had a number of different executives that have the preference. They love to hire those D1 college athletes that have been through the grist mill, know how to compete, know how to win, especially in the sales arena. What do you suppose that is? Or what is it about the athletic environment that kind of preps you for sales?
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